[Digikam-users] Improving photos

[Jakob Oestergaard]

Mikolaj Machowski wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Some other general digital photography topic.

Just throwing in my 0.02 Euro as well :)

> 
> Not all photos (I'd say minority) is coming from camera ideal.

I use the batch RAW->jpeg converter and find that many of my pictures 
just look wrong (much too bright or much too dark) after conversion. 
Those that come out wrong, I convert manually.

I also manually convert those that need cropping.

> Sometimes you need to remove noise, highlight dark areas, improve
> levels.

I usually avoid having to remove noise, because the results simply 
aren't that good - you can remove some noise, but if the image is really 
noisy, I prefer shooting a better image to repairing a noisy one. Of 
course you can't do that always :)

> How often do you use this techniques?

I manually convert/adjust/crop most of the images I end up keeping. 
Maybe 2 out of 3 or so.

Even if the batch converter does a good job, it's common (for me) to 
want a little cropping, or a little tweaking of the colours (usually 
just white balance).

> What are you doing with original photos?

1) Import RAW (16-bit)
2) Adjust white balance if need be (Ctrl-W)
3) Adjust levels if need be (Ctrl-L)
4) Crop if need be
5) Save as JPEG (90%)

If the image is very underexposed, I find it useful to adjust the 
exposure/black-point in the white-balance tool, to get a better exposure 
on the image while adjusting the white balance. An under-exposed image 
looks (at least to my eyes) colder than it is, so I tend to over-do the 
white balance adjustment on dark images if I don't correct the exposure too.

The above covers 95% of what I do with my photos now. I sometimes 
convert to B&W, sometimes rotate a few degrees to correct a camera tilt, 
  sometimes use noise reduction or image restoration, but these cases 
are rare.

Most of my images are birds in flight (taken with a 300mm prime) or 
landscape/nature (taken with a poor 18-55mm zoom which I hope to replace 
soon). People who take other kinds of images may well use very different 
parts of digikam, I don't know  :)

-- 
Best regards,
    Jakob Oestergaard
    [The SysOrb Team]